On September 6, 2000, Governor Gilmore’s office
announced a new partnership with America Online for Virginia’s schools.
Virginia will be the first state to implement the AOL@SCHOOL
program for K-12 students. The new America Online program is a free public
portal for teachers, students, and parents.

One of the coming special features will be
"State Focus." In addition to the present Department’s Web pages for Standards
of Learning (SOL) resources and documents, the AOL "State Focus" section
of AOL@SCHOOL will provide a new avenue
of access to Virginia SOL documents and teaching resources, and to the
Commonwealth of Knowledge website sponsored by Mrs. Gilmore.

To fully utilize the student e-mail and messaging
features of AOL@SCHOOL, special AOL software
is required. AOL will be disseminating the software free of charge to school
divisions. School division representatives have requested that the software
be sent to each central office so that technology staff can be certain
it is compatible with the division system before it is disseminated to
all schools. The software is due to be shipped the week of October 10,
2000.

The package AOL will send your superintendent
has an individual envelope addressed to each school building in your district.
AOL matches the software to each school’s Federal ID number, and it is
important to make sure that the correct envelope goes to each school!

Content filtering is also provided free through
the AOL@SCHOOL
software. AOL assigns each portal a filtering setting appropriate for the
age of the student (teachers and administrators are not filtered). Each
school’s envelope contains registration codes that determine the filtering
level for each portal. Also, e-mail, Chat, and Instant Messaging are available
for everyone, but we disable them for students. You can use the special
Account Management Tool (AMT) to "turn on" these features as you see fit
in accordance with your Acceptable Use Policies.

Although your schools’ software will arrive
soon, all six AOL@SCHOOL
portals are available for use anytime, from any browser at http://school.aol.com.
The online "Help" menu provides information about using nearly every aspect
of the service.

As with any program, we recommend that the
product be evaluated, and that the "Terms of Use" and the "Privacy Policy"
of AOL@SCHOOL be read thoroughly by school
administrators before beginning use of the program.

The Department of Education is not responsible
for the content of AOL@SCHOOL or its related
linked sites. Concerns should be directed to America Online.